Monday, August 4, 2008

Fonetika Lessons & More

This is a .pdf of a book I believe put together by Shemsiye and Salih Apakay sometime in the early to mid 1970's. It looks too well organized to be created by them, although they were both brilliant people. I think this was transposed from a smaller bound book to this size paper so that it could be copied and distributed for instruction. Many Tatar written materials in California are photocopies of photocopies and tend to be pretty washed out. I love that this book is hand-written and 45 pages or so. I don't know for sure that Shemsiye Apa put this together, but I'd like to think so. She was SUPREMELY helpful to me when I first started studying Tatar more. I would go to her house and Salih Absi and Shemsiye Apa would put a hot tea in front of me and correct every other syllable as I attempted to learn Tatar, reading to them from their books. They were very patient and passionate. They loved being Tatar, and worked very hard to help preserve our culture here in California. I went to her funeral last year, which was truly a sad day.